Finding modern ways to teach today's youth.

Education shouldn't have to compete with the entertainment industry. But whether we like it or not, the entertainment industry is setting the standard for what today's youth find important and will pay attention to. It effectively reaches teens and sells billions of dollars worth of goods and culture to them. "Edutainment" has made education's traditional print-oriented teaching methods woefully obsolete.

Recent Findings

A U.S. Department of Education study, "Young Adult Literacy and Schooling," revealed that less than 4 percent of non-high school graduates had the literacy level needed to comprehend a bus schedule. Given that 40 percent of those currently in the federal and state correctional system did not finish high school, it is no wonder that teens and adults leave the criminal justice system without improved life skills or literacy. They go from a structured world where not much but compliance is expected of them into the "real" world where there's competition for jobs and where self-reliant and responsible behavior is expected. Lacking preparedness, released inmates fail at real world necessities like finding and keeping a job. So these young adults quickly end up back in the juvenile justice or criminal justice system. The problem is not so much that people or institutions are failing; it's that we have failed to update the learning tools young adults need.

In a recent survey of 157 prison wardens, 93 percent indicated that illiteracy was a problem for many youths in detention. As a former educator, I have talked to a lot of high school students and adjudicated youths about what they thought of reading. This generated some interesting comments. Overwhelmingly, though, I heard students say they thought reading was slow and boring. From those who could read well to those who struggled with reading, there were complaints about the difficulty of the English vocabulary ("too many strange, big words") and the tedium of learning new vocabulary words. Trying to read through an article with too many new words is frustrating - the student eventually just gives up.

Non-native English speakers have an even harder time. Spanish-speaking students said that spelling in English is insane. They complained that English rules are not easy to grasp, and most said they had to memorize spelling to pass quizzes. For many of them memorization wasn't an interesting task, so they simply refused to put in the time to do it.

All the students, from the better readers to the struggling, preferred to get information from television. They perceived reading as "slow, painful and torturous," while TV was described as fast and exciting, with changing visuals and colors that kept them awake. I couldn't agree with them more. The unchanging landscapes of black and white print in a book can be pretty boring unless the reader reads fast and comprehends well. It took half of forever for many of my students to read one page, word by painful word. Compare this to watching TV. The television watcher stands to comprehend 123 words in 30 seconds. The words are supported by TV's visuals, which serve to drive a point home. But for a struggling reader, it can take five or 10 minutes to get through a 50-word paragraph.

The complaint that "reading is slow" is not surprising among a population constantly timed in to the fast-moving, split-second images of its generation's visual media. For teaching methods to effectively impart any kind of literacy, or to bring the preliterate and today's visually literate kids to print literacy, teaching methods are going to have to get competitive and visual.

Literacy is a funny concept. In our culture it has to do with the ability to read and write. One can learn a language with a good ear and become articulate, but remain illiterate (unable to read and write) in that language. I've noticed that a lot of the marginal or nonreaders understand questions delivered to them verbally in English but cannot respond to the same question written on a piece of paper.

The fascinating part about teaching the TV and Nintendo generation is witnessing students learning visually. If a bus schedule were read aloud in an animated 60-second TV commercial, you would probably have a roomful of illiterate students correctly reading the bus schedule a few minutes later. I am convinced, after teaching preliterate students, that modem kids don't learn by taking little logic bits and then stringing or weaving these bits into a picture. They're graphic. They use whole pictures and spoken language to convey a technique or an idea. They have to see a picture first; then a teacher can tear apart the picture into components and test students on their ability to rebuild the picture.

Technology And Literacy

Knowing that young adults respond to visuals more than print and tend to have short attention spans (sometimes only seconds), it would seem that technology would have some useful solutions for institutions trying to impart either life skills or literacy to teen and adult inmates. For example, multimedia curricula are TV-like and visual and provide hours of playing time on CD-ROM. These media are hardy and easy to secure, and workstations are becoming less expensive. Users can replay a lesson or segment as many times as needed to grasp an idea, acquire a skill or pass a test. In some ways, computers are endlessly patient, and programming allows a lesson to be given over and reexplained in a variety of ways so the student will be able to grasp one of several explanatory approaches.

Turn-key systems can be developed that require little staff time and are as easy to use as checking out a library book. Although I haven't yet seen private industry develop such learning systems for prisons, prison wardens could use their considerable clout and bring innovative learning systems to prisons.

A lot of people think today's kids are different from those of previous generations, especially kids in the juvenile justice system. But the difference we see is not in the kids themselves; it comes from the change in our culture. Our culture has undergone an enormous and shocking change in the past five decades. Family bonds, religious beliefs and cultural values have eroded while economic instability and the pervasive influence of the media - from radio and TV to computers and those ubiquitous Nintendos - have given us teens who learn in ways we barely understand.

There is still controversy about how to reach and teach young adults in the criminal justice system, especially how to impart literacy and life skills to non-native speakers, disadvantaged learners and those with learning disabilities. But the visual effects and tempo seen in music videos combined with the learning systems that are possible with state-of-the-art, computerized multimedia curricula certainly can further education for today's youth.

Sharon Curcio has an MBA in marketing and has worked as a product manager and new product development specialist as well as a classroom teacher at Dade County Public Schools for grades 7 through 12. She has developed several high-tech curriculum approaches and welcomes your response and comments.